It’s been a generation of miracles, indeed.

For 25 years, I have been privileged to watch impossible things come true – dreams, mine and others – children in pain healing, a community coming together like I once imagined when I was a boy – all of you here tonight, across so many barriers, standing on the common ground of loving and serving the outcast and the broken.

Such dreams are not just fairy tales when they are anchored in a careful rendering of God’s call, which always proves itself by having results that are valuable to others, especially to those being served.  Mother Teresa said:  Service ministries endure their cycles because of the commitment of those called to continue even in the dark times, doing what we do.  And what is it, this thing we do? 

When I was a boy in the 60s, I read a book by J. D. Salinger, called Catcher in the Rye – it’s main character was a young man living on the edge in New York City, looking for something real in what he saw as a mostly phony world.  One day, in the midst of a noisy train station, he suddenly imagines children at play in a field, and himself being at the edge, where there is a cliff, catching them before they fall.  We are catchers in the rye, too, only our laborers stand at the bottom of that cliff, trying to catch those who’ve already fallen, or been pushed.  Sometimes their plunging faces are hopeless, sometimes shattered with fear, sometimes angry, and their return to the field can seem somehow futile.  But we catch them, if we can, and return them over and over again, if necessary, to the fields above, because that’s what we do.

Dorothy Mann, one of our wonderful grandparents at the Big Springs village, emailed me last week: “I compare what happened on 9/11 to what happens each day to the children we take care of.  They go through things that I cannot even imagine and then we expect them to just forget and forgive and go on with their lives as if none of it ever happened.  I see now that it takes years of healing for them with much love and patience on our part to encourage their healing process.” 

That is the patience and the faith, the vision, required of those in the trenches, providing the daily care for society’s most wounded and vulnerable and disturbed children.  What we have discovered together over these 25 years, we affirm tonight, that we believe in love as an indestructible force, as a light in the darkness that the darkness cannot overcome, a love, in the words of Shakespeare, that looks on storms and is not shaken:  For that’s how God loves us, unshakably:  In life’s storms, when all is turned upside down, when the veil is thin, it is said that we come near the unshakeable essence of His being. Perhaps, if we are ready, His spirit of perseverance enters into us.  And even if, in the moment of darkest darkness, we fail to be still enough to make the right choices, God has a plan for that, too. 

In brokenness, His Holiness seeks us out directly, His mercy and grace and love want to come into us, to fill our shatteredness, that we might witness the power of His presence over all things destructive, and discover, in the midst of our deepest anguish, the real living present truth of the old verse, “Love makes the world go round”.  For it really does.